Antique calculators bring Tustin man fame

It was 1985 when Guy Ball saw his first old calculator at a Salvation Army.

“It was really cool looking and had this white plastic, sculpted body. The numbers lit up in a pretty blue fluorescent tone. I thought, ‘This is pretty cool,' ” he said.

That Panasonic launched a more than 20-year obsession with calculators dating back to the early 1970s. Today's calculators have silver and gray screens, but the early calculators featured blue or red tones.

Though Ball recently sold his collection of 2,400 calculators – about 1,200 were duplicates – he has gained a reputation among collectors as an expert. On Dec. 11, he was featured on “Storage Wars” on the A& E channel.

“It was wonderful on so many different levels,” Ball said. “I always get nervous when I do something like that. You just never know how things are going to turn out. I was very happy with the way things came across.”

Ball invited Darrell Sheets and his son Brandon, along with the film crew of “Storage Wars,” to his home for about two hours in July to film the show that recently aired. The father-son team brought him a mechanical calculator dating to the 1920s for appraisal. They filmed for about 45 minutes, which was broadcast in only a couple minutes on the show.

Ball, who already was a fan of “Storage Wars,” showed the Sheetses how to work the machine. A sticker on the mechanical calculator from a Danish store led him to the date and place where it had been purchased.

“It was pretty cool and a lot of fun,” he said. “The guys were nice people. I felt comfortable with them.”

Ball watched the episode as it aired from his house in Tustin with his wife, Linda, and sons, Nicholas, 17, and Alexander, 16. Since then, he has gotten compliments from friends, colleagues and acquaintances.

“My head is still a couple sizes too big,” Ball joked. “There's a certain notoriety to it.”

Ball literally wrote the book on electronic calculators. He still has about 1,000 copies, stored in his garage. Ball co-authored “Collector's Guide to Pocket Calculators” with collector Bruce Flamm of Riverside. The book, which was published in 1997 and sells on
Amazon.com, lists prices for the 1,500 models it mentions.

Part of the draw for Ball is that the calculators demonstrate among the first uses of integrated circuits and real electronics. He recalls the 1970s, when the first electronic calculators were available.

“They were new, a lot of money. I remember I couldn't afford them because they were a couple hundred – this was for a basic four-function,” Ball said.

Years later, he developed an affinity for the interesting calculators from the early 1970s. It was the style and design that drew him in. He would stop at antique shops, garage sales and swap meets to look for new models and brands. While in New Jersey for a reunion, he found a man at a swap meet selling a box of about 20 varieties of vintage calculators for $1 each.

“As I'm going through it, I'm so excited – like a kid in a candy store,” Ball said. “People see me and think I have something exciting and come over, and go, ‘Oh, calculators.' ” He bought about 20 of the calculators and brought them back to Orange County.

Ball stopped collecting in 2006. By then, he had 2,400 calculators from the early 1970s. He had collected one of each of the three first electronic calculators made by Canon, Sharp and Busicom – including what he calls the holy grail of electronic calculators: a Busicom 120A, known as the Handy LE 120A. He later sold it for $1,000.

He explains the evolution of the calculator with excitement. When a percentage function entered the market, everyone wanted a calculator. In 1972, Hewlett-Packard released the first scientific calculator. “That went like gangbusters. There was a six-month wait,” he said.

But by late 2011, his calculators were packed away in nine five-drawer filing systems, filling a space the size of a Suburban in his two-car garage.

Ball sold his collection except for his 10 favorite calculators, including the original white Panasonic. The first night without his collection, Ball said he felt a bit depressed. Later, after the storage containers were removed, he felt freedom.

“You kind of get captured by your collection, particularly as I was because I was so known in the Internet world for calculators. It becomes part of you,” he said. “There was a point it was done. It was time.”

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